User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2009/09/02/Ethics course Lecture 2

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Vocabulary

Oh yeah. More vocabulary.

  • Historicity. Wow. I didn't even know this was a word.
  • conflagration
  • rectitude
  • polyglot
  • ugilitarian - This is what I heard come from his mouth. Google doesn't know what it means and neither do I so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this word doesn't exist.
  • Interdigitate - He used this one again.
  • Dialectic
  • precend - No clue what this means or what language it is in.
  • Interdisciplinarity. Wow. That is a real word.
  • profundity
  • autodidact
  • coenjoined - He used a word that sounded like this.
  • transdisciplinarian - I think he means some one that is needing a field change and is awaiting the appropriate operation to change one's field.
  • communitarian. Where are the words coming from? I've spoken English my entire life and I have never heard of such things.
  • contemporaneity
  • discursis - This is what he said.
  • dialectic
  • rabitas - No clue.
  • dyadic
  • ameliorated
  • porosis. I don't actually recall us talking about bones but he did use this word.
  • anachronistic
  • perdurable
  • adjointly - I wonder if he is talking about the adjoint of a matrix.
  • fallacious
  • Lenticel. Okay, now he is just toying with us in class with his fancy words. I have no clue as to how he used this in a sentence and how that sentence was then related to ethics.
  • religare - Some Latin or other language word.
  • posit
  • purduric - Something that sounded like this.
  • finitude
  • fiduciary

What might be considered as notes

  • Philosophy of anything has 3 components to it
  • Again, he repeats that ethics and morals are not the same.
    • Morals are what we find as good.
    • Ethics are tools. Formal systems that use morals to evaluate things.
      • This is circular logic I think. Unless we are defining a lump of clay as morals. Then a person that uses their hands to shape the clay is using their hands (ethics) to make something from it. But this doesn't make sense because a hand and a chunk of clay are completely separate from each other. But, you cannot have ethics without morals. Hmm. I'd like to change my mind here and say that ethics and morals are intertwined with each other but they are not the same thing. So I still agree with the professor. Which by the way has a very repressed New Yorker accent.
  • He says that you can segregate morals from ethics. I disagree since being moral is not a necessary and sufficient condition to have ethics.
  • He states that there are 2 ethical systems people use.
    • Normative
    • Applied
      • I find it funny that the only way I'm going to be able to learn anything from this class is because I can look up the pedantic terminology of this course online. Thank you open knowledge! I'm not sure the prof would like it since he bad mouthed this idea last time calling it (with a negative emphasis) libertarian.
  • Apparently there exists a profession called ethicist. I guess this mean someone that deals with ethics. He says that these people do not talk about how people should act but somehow uses analytics to decide on a decision. What these analytics are, I don't know and he didn't describe them.
  • He says moral reasoning uses some sort of analysis. What kind of analysis? I thought ethics was the tools used to make a decision based on morals. Wouldn't this imply that ethics uses this magical analysis? And not morals?
  • He says that there are 2 levels of scientists that use ethics.
    • I really don't understand this comment.
  • He really likes to emphasize the word clinician.
  • I don't know what he was talking about when he said this but, what does "subserve the anthropological institute" mean and what context was it used in? I write it down because it is the most flowery thing I have heard.
  • I include this quotes because they are pure genius.
    • "implicitly and somewhat systematically"
    • "technical rightness"
    • "ethics should provide for dialectic"
    • "ethics is the translation of the normative to the applied"
    • "A moral decision of pragmatic value that is based upon a way of reasoning and particular affirmations and attendant obligations."
  • He's talking about how ethics can make people come together to make a society. This he thinks is the correct role for ethics; a focal study of society.
  • He's gone off about his research now. Something about neuroscience and how they are mapping morals in the brain with imaging techniques. This is kind of cool. I'm guessing they subject someone to a moral dilemma and look at their blood flow in the brain.
  • So he keeps complaining about how this class is too short. I'm actually quite afraid at what he would consider adequate time for this subject.
  • Somehow if you use more than one ethical system, this makes you a relativist. Supposedly this is not a good thing in the ethicist's field.
    • This doesn't make sense to me. Consider 2 different people from 2 different societies. Both societies will make their own moral compasses that their respective citizens will follow. Now let the 2 individuals from their respective societies interact with each other. If a situation occurs that requires the 2 people to use ethics, then isn't it ethical for each of these people to try and understand the other person and their foreign moral system to resolve an issue? This means they are using two different ethical tools to fix a problem. How is this wrong?
  • Hmm. He states that every fact is interpretive. Not really if you consider the fact that gravity exists. Or how about the speed of light in a vacuum.
  • Again, he states that ethics are tools. What those tools are still has not been discussed.

Finally!

We actually start talking about something that is in line with the theme of the course and it is going to end in 15 minutes.